Home Sweet Home

Great Northern, Manchester

Visited on Saturday 3 September 2016

Home Sweet Home is one of Manchester’s most popular haunts. It’s an American diner with a difference, mixing the traditional stodgy food with a quaint and cosy home dining room feel, complete with wooden panelling on the walls and mismatched furniture.  It’s a refreshing way to experience the USA without the hustle and bustle that you would normally take as a given.

The original restaurant opened on Edge Street in the Northern Quarter back in 2011 and was an instant hit, complete with scrumptious milkshakes and decadent cakes so colourful they wouldn’t look out of place in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.  Over the last five years, this bustling eatery has grown and grown, to the extent that, in October 2015, a second establishment opened in the Great Northern Warehouse.

I’ve visited the original site in the Northern Quarter on a few occasions previously and have yet to have a bad experience. It’s one of those places that you find yourself being drawn back to time and time again. When a close friend hinted that she’d like to go there to celebrate her 21^st birthday, we decided to mix things up a bit and try the new venue.

The Great Northern version of Home Sweet Home certainly has more of a restaurant feel to it; it’s more suitable for an evening meal, in contrast to the twee original. The menu has expanded, meaning the choice is even more overwhelming. You can indulge in breakfast, brunch, toasties, burgers and ‘big plates’, (which should really be called huge) including a Pulled Pork Pile Up and the old favourite, Mac n Cheese.

I opted for the ‘French Dip’: a brioche bun filled with thinly sliced, gloriously juicy flattened rump steak, swiss cheese and picked gherkins complete with a rich beer and onion gravy for dipping and pouring. It was a taste sensation. Although it looked small when it arrived, the bread was jam-packed with strips of the luscious steak which melted onto the surface of your tongue. It was a knife-and-fork job, as attempting to manhandle it would have just been too messy, with runny cheese and pickles dropping all over the authentic wooden board on which the sandwich was served.

When the two establishments revamped their menus recently, there was one major change. Whilst burgers and sandwiches used to come served with a pile of seasoned fries as standard, they are now all served on their own, with a selection of fries available to order as a side dish. Quite naughty, considering the prices are still the same. Taking advantage of the situation and using it as an excuse to eat more food, we opted for the bacon double fries: a basket of fries topped with crushed burger beef, cheese, ‘baconnaise’ and pickles. Quite frankly, they could be eaten as a meal all on their own. A rather cheap one too, given that they cost £5.00, which is pricey for a side dish intended to be eaten alongside your meal, but very cheap for a lunch in its entirety.

Suitably stuffed after those incredibly fattening fries, I could have skipped dessert but if you don’t leave Home Sweet Home rolling towards the door, clutching your stomach, then you haven’t experienced it properly. So, like a trouper, I struggled on.

Choosing a cake is a stressful experience. Stood in front of the cabinet, my eyes bigger than my already incredibly large stomach, a myriad of colours and flavours in front of me, it usually takes me at least three looks before I come close to making a decision. The ‘Blueberry Yum Muffin’, unfortunately, was the wrong choice. There’s a first time for everything and this was the first time I had felt disappointed by my choice of gateaux at Home Sweet Home. It looked much better than it was. A plain vanilla sponge studded with the odd blueberry, covered with blueberry frosting and topped with pieces of blueberry muffin, it wasn’t too sweet and was very light and fluffy, which perhaps was a blessing given that I was already feeling too full after the main course. In my opinion, the kind of cake that would be perfect accompanying a cup of tea for a mid-afternoon treat, but nothing out of the ordinary.

With so much choice on the menu and so many different cakes to sample (Exceedingly Cheeky is now top of my list, a bakewell tart inspired cake topped with a smorgasbord of Mr Kipling minis), I’ll never tire of Home Sweet Home. It’s perfect at any time of the day, whether you’re after a blow-out, artery-clogging feast or a simple cake break.